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Other than RoboFab and Glyphs, what other software exists that can be used to create UFO files? I'm aware of Area51, but that only seems to convert UFO to OTF, not the other way round.

I've run into some problems with the RoboFab UFO macro in FontLab (partial UFO created, script gags on a particular glyph, does not continue), which I've written to Erik about. And Glyphs seems to mess up the glyph order in the UFO, which is not the end of the world for my current needs, but is unnerving.

Thanks, James. Unfortunately I hit the same bug with UFO Central as I do with the RoboFab export script.

And...

Aaaaaaaargh! Another aborted RoboFab script just saved my VFB for me -- which I did not ask it to do -- and did not create a backup, leaving me with a VFB in which all my composites have been decomposed.

All I'm trying to do is generate two UFOs to use as masters in UFOstretch. Yes, the fonts are large; yes, I'm using some unusual glyph naming structures; but really there's nothing in here that any of my other tools have a problem with.

I managed to get Glyphs to export one imported OTF as a UFO. It messed up the glyph order apparently, but it will load in UFOstretch. But Glyphs gags on the other OTF: it becomes unresponsive and I have to force close it eventually.

While using my Windows machine to delete the mixed up UFO that I generated from Glyphs from a USB drive, I was suddenly confronted by this message:

That's weird, I thought, I should take a screenshot of that and post it on Typophile. So I did so, and when asked to name the image file I tried 'con.png'. And then I got the really weird message:

So it turns out that 'con' is one of the file/folder names that have been reserved as device driver names by Microsoft since the days of MS-DOS. Here's a full list of such names.

The moral of the story is: if you're trying to generate UFOs on Windows, or trying to open UFOs created on another platform, make sure that none of your glyphs are called /con/ /prn/ /aux/ /clock$/ /nul/ (/NULL/ is thankfully okay) etc.

Thanks for the walk down memory lane. I used to use the "nul" device all the time -- a great way to save time and paper when trouble-shooting files my DOS printing program didn't like. I occasionally used con, too, but still didn't see what was going on in this thread till you spelled it out. I assume DOS's "copy/b filename con" capability was borrowed from Unix -- perhaps OSX is better at hiding such details.